We witnessed the miracle

Some events are capable of marking a date in the lives of those who witnessed its power. The force that attacks, deaths or tragedies entail to return us to that moment some time later is unmatched. Everyone remembers what they were doing or who they were with on 9/11. Or where 11-M caught him. In Italy something similar happens on the afternoon of May 23, 1992, when Cosa Nostra murdered judge Giovanni Falcone. But time can also be traveled in a less painful way through the inexplicable emotion of some secular miracle. I had just arrived in Rome and that night I ended up watching the game in a bar in Trastevere with some friends and with the writer and journalist Martín Caparrós. There wasn't much chance of getting much on the court, so getting to know him, who was writing a report on the game for

The New York Times

, made the night worth it. What happened 96 minutes later, until the sixth goal scored by Sergi Roberto, remains inexplicable.

PSG was already then everything that one can hate about modern football and the culprit of the obscene inflation in the transfer market. He embodied the role of supervillain so well that the year he crossed the Champions League with Real Madrid, some of us secretly wished for the first time in our lives that the victory would stay at the Bernabéu. The Parisian team was us buying clothes online without rhyme or reason and then returning them because they didn't fit like the model in the photo. Everything they acquired during a decade, spending around 1.7 billion euros neither favored them nor served the only purpose that Qatar had: winning the Champions League. Their defect also embodied the virtue of football: they could never buy a real team. That's why that short circuit also tasted better. And that is why it is now stinging to see that the only thing that makes sense that they have found in that catalog that Nasser Al-Khelaïfi looks through every summer is what we had on the bench the night of the 6-1.

The arrival of Luis Enrique humanizes PSG and has turned it into something resembling a team almost for the first time in the last decade. They play, they win, they lose and they also suffer. But there is a collective sense. And Mbappé, with both feet outside the club, is the last of the Mohicans of that compulsive obsession with buying stars. It's unclear if that's what the Qatari monarchy wanted when they signed him. Not even when he became obsessed with Barça one summer after another, starting a war that he resolved every August with the checkbook: whether it was preventing the departure of some of his stars like Marquinhos or Verratti, or counterattacking with the purchase of Neymar, who probably He played the best game of his life on the night of the 6-1, leading the way and scoring definitive goals and assists (the last-second pass to Sergi Roberto was also his). But he gives the feeling that today no one would dispute his victory.

What we will remember until Wednesday's match at the Parc des Princes begins, however, will be that at minute 86:47 of the match at the Camp Nou, Barça beat them 3-1 and was not enough to pass. They needed three more goals that came with thunder in a storm. What happened that night was so unbecoming of culé nature that, when the fieldside interviews ended, we didn't even think about going to celebrate. We left the Trastevere venue where we had watched the game almost in silence and we all went home. It must be what the philosopher Wittgenstein said: “What nothing can be said about, it is better to remain silent.”

You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes on

Facebook

and

X

, or sign up here to receive

our weekly newsletter

.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_